How Far are We from Robust Long Abstractive Summarization?

Abstract

Abstractive summarization has made tremendous progress in recent years. In this work, we perform fine-grained human annotations to evaluate long document abstractive summarization systems (i.e., models and metrics) with the aim of implementing them to generate reliable summaries. For long document abstractive models, we show that the constant strive for state-of-the-art ROUGE results can lead us to generate more relevant summaries but not factual ones. For long document evaluation metrics, human evaluation results show that ROUGE remains the best at evaluating the relevancy of a summary. It also reveals important limitations of factuality metrics in detecting different types of factual errors and the reasons behind the effectiveness of BARTScore. We then suggest promising directions in the endeavor of developing factual consistency metrics. Finally, we release our annotated long document dataset with the hope that it can contribute to the development of metrics across a broader range of summarization settings.

Publication
The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP, Abu Dhabi, December 7–11, 2022 (CORE A)
Huan Yee Koh
Huan Yee Koh
PhD Student @ Monash (04/2022-)

My research interests mainly focus on the areas of machine learning, drug discovery, anomaly detection and Natural Language Processing.

Jiaxin Ju
Jiaxin Ju
PhD Student @ Griffith University (02/2023-)

My research interests mainly focus on machine learning and Natural Language Processing.

He Zhang
He Zhang
Research Fellow @ RMIT

My research interests include data mining, machine learning, and graph analysis.

Shirui Pan
Shirui Pan
Professor and ARC Future Fellow

My research interests include data mining, machine learning, and graph analysis.